and using the relative levels of carbon isotopes to pick out more exactly the origin of those fats in 29 of the samples.
Carbon isotopes from milk fat can also point to the sorts of food the dairy animals ate
as different plants incorporate varying amounts of carbon-13 relative to carbon-12. The team found that the milk fats came from a range of plants,
Tracing of the radioisotope calcium-45, for example allows sensitive measurements of calcium carbonate uptake in the skeletons of marine organisms,
and Barry Sharpless for his work on chemical syntheses that selectively create one of two mirror-image forms (enantiomers) of a molecule.
but it is most effective with very fine particles of gold  and Madre de dios tends to yield larger, coarser grains.
But carbon seems to be the touchiest subject internationally. China does not publish official figures for carbon dioxide emissions,
"China s real carbon emissions could be higher than our provincial aggregate estimate, or even lower than our national estimate.
and to devise a carbon trading system that will be tested in seven provinces and cities next year.
Ion Torrent (a subsidiary of Life Technologies. The company, based in Guilford, Connecticut, said on 23 Â July that it would attempt to win the Archon Genomics X Prize,
G. WOOD/AFP/GETTY IMAGESCARBON tax Australia introduced a carbon tax on 1 Â July, in
But vast swathes of forest have been cut down to make way for the crop, often in carbon-rich peatlands,
A recent life-cycle assessment suggested that it could take up to 220 years for a plantation to become carbon neutral (W. M. J. Achten and L. V. Verchot Ecol.
"It is possible to have carbon-neutral plantations if they are grown on already heavily logged and degraded land,
but annual carbon emissions associated with deforestation have not fallen nearly as much, says a Brazilian study that combines satellite data
The difference is in large part due to a natural lag as carbon stocks slowly decay
A direct conversion of that lost biomass into carbon would suggest a drop in annual carbon dioxide emissions from more than 1. 1 billion tonnes of CO2 in 2004 to 298 million tonnes of CO2 a reduction of nearly 74%.
and the fact that forest debris cut in one year might be burned in another (see Carbon lag).
but what we are trying to express is that this is a more correct way to understand carbon emissions,
He estimates that efforts to forestall deforestation in the Amazon have lowered Brazil s overall carbon emissions by roughly 17%since 2004.
allowing Brazilian scientists to provide annual estimates of both deforestation and carbon emissions, and setting the stage for a deeper analysis of the impacts of logging, agriculture and forest regrowth.
scientists do need to better understand the way carbon is cycling through forests. And she says the next major challenge is for INPE to build the effects of widespread logging operations into its emissions model."
In 1957, the virus jumped to Portugal after pigs near Lisbon s airport were fed infected human food scraps (the virus particles can survive meat curing processes.
Pigs can leave virus particles on transport vehicles, for example, exposing whole shipments of uninfected animals.
Battery rescue A123 Systems a leading US manufacturer of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, may have found a solution to its financial woes.
particle to the online preprint server arxiv. org on 31 july (ATLAS Collaboration http://arxiv. org/abs/1207.7214 (2012) and CMS Collaboration http://arxiv org
Oddone has overseen the final years of the lab s Tevatron particle collider and a shift in focus to experiments involving neutrinos and high-intensity (rather than high-energy) collisions.
when they announced to the world s media that they had fused deuterium atoms at room temperatures.
Brazil s fund for low-carbon agriculture lies fallowrice cultivation has received a boost in Brazil
As of 2011, low-carbon agriculture money could be used to fund activities that caused emissions of other greenhouse gases,
or had nothing to do with carbon sequestration, such as organic agriculture. Farmers and ranchers can currently use ABC loans to buy cattle
Persuading farmers that going low-carbon is good for business will be difficult in a country where, this year,
the government has to be able to assess how well it is working to reduce carbon emissions,
for example, that"Brazilian soil labs simply aren prepared t to measure total soil carbon content. Assad s team has sampled several sites around the country
one hectare of recovered pasture could store four times as much carbon as one hectare of degraded pasture.
because he no longer owned the compound, but he did go on to produce treatments for diseases such as cancer at the Wayne State university School of medicine in Detroit, Michigan,
The  3. 2-million (US$4. 1-million) study was led by Gilles-Eric Sà ralini, a molecular biologist at the University of Caen, France, in collaboration with the Paris-based Committee
nanosafety and chemical accidents for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris. They were designed for testing chemicals where precise doses of purified and well-characterized compounds can be administered,
whereas compounds in foods are heterogeneous, and doses are difficult to control. Regulators rely mainly on more robust tests that compare the toxicological and nutritional profiles of GM foods with their non-GM counterparts to screen for potential concerns.
they are decorated usually with plant-specific sugar molecules, which could prompt a dangerous immune reaction if injected into patients.
says Herta Steinkellner, a molecular biologist at the University of Natural resources and Life sciences in Vienna.
but that add chemical tags in the form of methyl (CH3) molecules to sections of the DNA.
What is your position on cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, and other policies proposed to address global climate change
So I oppose steps like a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system that would handicap the American economy
In two reports published today1, 2, the CGIAR says that reducing agriculture s carbon footprint is central to limiting climate change.
 Vermeulen and her colleagues examined for the first time the carbon emissions for all stages of the global food system.
Swedish scientists discovered in 2002 that a wide range of baked and fried goods contain worryingly high levels of acrylamide1 a simple organic molecule that is a neuro  toxin and carcinogen in rats.
Battery bankruptcy A123 Systems, a leading US Â manufacturer of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, filed for bankruptcy on 16 Â October.
In 2006, scientists at Agresearch in Hamilton, New zealand began to experiment with molecules that interfere with the MESSENGER RNA go-between that enables translation of a gene into protein.
says Stefan Wagner, a molecular biologist at Agresearch. That's why it has taken so long to succeed in making an allergen-free cow,
and leaves no mark in the genome, says Bruce Whitelaw, a molecular biologist at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh in the United kingdom,
Breast-milk molecule raises risk of HIV transmissiona type of sugar that occurs naturally in breast milk can double the likelihood of a HIV-negative baby acquiring the virus through breast feeding
The molecule, called 3'-sialyllactose (3'-SL), is found in varying concentrations in the milk of different women.
Several labs are trying to identify how variation in the prevalence of the large sugar molecules in breast milk, collectively known as human milk oligosaccharides (HMOS), influences infant health.
or cancel a mission aimed at pinning down the mysterious carbon sinks that are slowing the rise of greenhouse gases in Earth s atmosphere.
) Neither Japan s existing Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite nor NASA s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2),
Carbonsat s competitor for ESA funding, FLEX, would also help to pin down carbon sinks, by measuring the faint fluorescence generated by plants during photosynthesis a measure of how efficiently they absorb carbon."
"The last thing we want to do is to destroy the forests or whatever is absorbing almost half of the CO2 that we are emitting,
by using specialist enzymes to break down the long-chain cellulose molecules and Brazil doesn t want to be left behind.
(which includes E. rostratum) the same molecule that darkens and protects human skin seem to be generating more human infections for reasons he does not understand.
MÃ lanie Salque, a chemist at the University of Bristol, UK, used gas chromatography and carbon-isotope ratios to analyse molecules preserved in the pores of the ancient clay
of carbon emissions that they did not actually incur, says a report from CE Delft, a Dutch environmental consultancy group.
carried out research on the molecular basis of human genetic disease at Stanford university in California, and was a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
and to find molecular markers that distinguish between different strains of the pathogen and that could be used to develop tailored strategies for its control.
But scientists and environmentalists are pushing for an expanded effort to nurture low-carbon technologies.
and development that could drive down the cost of large-scale, low-carbon energy, and ultimately make a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade agreement politically palatable.
The President s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology has recommended increasing spending on energy research and development from around US$4 billion per year to $16 billion,
ratios of oxygen and nitrogen isotopes in the core show that some 6, 000 Â years after the onset of the Eemian,
it is based not on carbon but on a latticework of boron and nitrogen atoms. Computer simulations have indicated that a rare crystalline form of boron nitride would resist indentation even better than diamond
A nanotwin is a crystalline segment that mirrors the orientation of atoms on the other side of an interface (a so-called twin boundary) within a material.
which the atoms of nitrogen and boron form an onionlike structure of nested layers. Pressed into macroscopic pellets
says Gert WÃ rheide, a molecular palaeobiologist at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany.
Globally each year, around 140 million tonnes of nitrogen is lost to the environment as ammonia, nitrogen oxides and other compounds.
or molecular data, from the living species. They uploaded all their data, definitions and supporting pictures to Morphobank,
"What fascinates me most is the tremendous incongruence between the morphological and molecular data, says Mark Springer, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Riverside.
whereas molecular data shows that they belong to different orders. This is why O'Leary and her team relied on both types of information,
whereas other groups have relied on molecular data alone. Comparing the two estimates is like comparing"apples and oranges,
Fungi and roots store a surprisingly large share of the world's carbonthe largest fraction of carbon held in the soils of northern forests may derive from the living
By some estimates, the planet's soils contain more than twice the carbon in the atmosphere.
and contain around 16%of total soil carbon. Until the last decade or so, most scientists had presumed that much of the decomposed organic matter, or humus
But when Lindahl and his colleagues carbon-dated samples taken at various depths throughout the soil on 30 islands in two Swedish lakes near the Arctic circle,
they found that accumulation of organic material on top of the ground alone could not explain the rates at which soil carbon built Up on islands larger than 1 hectare,
each square metre of soil accumulated in the past 100 years holds about 6. 2 kilograms of carbon.
But on islands smaller than 0. 1 hectare, the past century of soil contains a whopping 22.5 kilograms of carbon per square metre.
The difference in carbon-sequestration rates, the researchers report in Science1, can be explained entirely by carbon derived from the roots of trees and shrubs and their symbiotic fungi.
Whereas about 47%of the soil carbon on the large islands came from roots and ectomycorrhizal fungi
It is unclear why the small islands built up a larger fraction of root-and fungi-derived carbon in the past century,
while that trees divert carbon to their ectomycorrhizal fungi, but having 70%of soil carbon derive from them is much more than we could have expected,
she says. Benjamin Turner, a soil scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Balboa, Panama, says that the findings are a"great example of how analyses of sequences of soils of different ages contribute to the understanding of processes that wouldn t
It is not clear how the results might affect estimates of how carbon sequestration in a warming climate
and a loss of soil carbon as carbon dioxide wafts into the atmosphere. But at the same time, he suggests,
as well as their roots and fungi, causing an ovrall increase in carbon sequestration
Will we kill off today's animals if we revive extinct ones? An article by Scientific American.
In the most extensive study of its kind1, an international team of scientists simulated the effect of business-as usual emissions on the amounts of carbon locked up in tropical forests across Amazonia, Central america, Asia and Africa through to 2100.
rainforests across the three regions retained their carbon stocks even as atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration increased throughout the century.
for every 1 °C rise in temperature, around 50 billion tonnes of carbon would be released from the tropics.
That tropical forests will retain their carbon stocks long term gives a major boost to policies aimed at keeping forests intact,
The Biomass project aims to take radar measurements of global forest biomass to assess terrestrial carbon stocks and fluxes.
and the failure of the agency s Orbiting Carbon Observatory and the solar monitoring and aerosol mission Glory (see Nature http://doi. org/bqjhn7;
But data on global forest biomass a major store of land carbon and a key indicator of biodiversity are no less important,
satellite observations are needed to quantify global carbon emissions for tropical forests, for which no reliable ground inventories exist.
Thomson Reuters Point Carbonprices for allowances to emit a tonne of carbon dioxide on Europe s carbon-trading market are likely to remain low until 2020,
This means that the market is unlikely to spur investment in low-carbon energy, one of the scheme s key goals when it was launched in 2005.
according to Carbon Tracker, even though burning them would cause a catastrophic rise in global temperatures. 24-25 april On World Malaria Day (25 april),
Some scientists say that there is insufficient evidence to implicate these compounds. Ecotoxicologist James Cresswell, who studies pollination at the University of Exeter,
Experiment aims to steep rainforest in carbon dioxideone of the wild cards in climate change is the fate of the Amazon rainforest.
A dying rainforest could release gigatonnes of carbon into  the atmosphere, accelerating warming; a  CO2-fertilized forest could have the opposite effect,
sucking up carbon and putting the brakes on climate change. Climate modellers trying to build carbon fertilization into their forecasts have had  precious few data to go on."
"The number one question is, how will tropical forests react if we put more CO2 into the atmosphere?
Because of the sheer volume of carbon cycling through the tropics, the fertilization effect has a massive impact on the amount of carbon that forests take up globally and on how much remains in the atmosphere.
Persistent organic pollutants (POPS) are based carbon compounds that are resistant to break-down. Some originate from the burning of fuel or the processing of electronic waste,
and Tibetan plateau are rife with those toxic compounds. To trace the sources of those pollutants
Because some persistent compounds accumulate at the top of the food chain, humans can be exposed to POPS by eating meat and fish.
"They do not emit any of those toxic compounds, says Xu, "but are forced to shoulder the burden of their impact
Land plants create a huge carbon sink as they suck CO2 out of the air to build leaves
That lowers annual carbon uptake by 150 Â million tonnes equivalent to more than 15%of Europe s annual man-made CO2 emissions.
The most extreme events can turn forests and grasslands from carbon sinks to sources. In 2003 alone, a record-breaking heatwave in Europe led to the release of more CO2 than is locked up normally over four years1.
Researchers have presumed that this triggered a large carbon release but such responses are hard to predict.
which stores carbon in leaves, roots and soil. It had a smaller effect on soil respiration,
which releases carbon, so the net result was a decline in carbon uptake. The experiments also showed that plants
and soils keep a memory of disturbances, says Michael Bahn, an ecologist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria who oversees a grassland experiment.
and found that later ones had a larger effect on net carbon release. Existing biosphere models do not capture such effects,
The world s soils contain almost 100 Â gigatonnes of carbon twice as much as the entire atmosphere.
which makes a protein that helps build the receptor molecules that sense many smells. A series of experiments showed that without the Orco protein
Laurence Zwiebel, a molecular entomologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, says that Vosshall's study shows that DEET does not work by simply blocking the smells that are conveyed by Orco,
Zwiebel s team is developing molecules that overactivate the protein2, in an attempt to see
That isotope was relatively easy to work with because it is long-lived. Other putatively pear-shaped peers are highly unstable and difficult to handle.
and his colleagues fired a high-energy proton beam at a piece of uranium carbide in the ISOLDE isotope mass separator facility at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland."
"A whole cauldron of isotopes is made when you splat protons onto the target, says Butler.
and predicts that the lighter isotopes of radium should be more strongly pear shaped than the heavier ones.
Germany, analysed the spectrum of ultraviolet light emitted by cadmium ions, which is influenced subtly by the shape of the nucleus. Cadmium nuclei are nearly spherical,
The latest result confirms that radium isotopes should be a good place to look for for electric dipoles,
and that some isotopes of thorium and uranium might be even better.""I believe that this will eventually lead to results of much broader impact than this experiment alone,
the researchers analysed the nitrogen isotopes found in bone collagen, which reflect the main source of protein in the diet.
But the identification of a molecular mechanism that controls penis loss in birds goes some way to solving this conundrum.
Carbon tax scrapped Australia will shift from a carbon tax to an emissions trading system for greenhouse gases one year ahead of schedule, announced Prime minister Kevin Rudd on 16 Â July.
The move is expected to lower the price of carbon from about US$23 a tonne to around $6 a tonne beginning in July 2014,
require a 6%drop in the carbon footprint of transport fuel by 2020, by which time renewable energy must fuel 10%of the transport sector.
peatlands and wetlands rich in sequestered carbon causing large emissions of carbon dioxide.""It s kind of obvious if you think about it,
The numbers are different for different crops (see Carbon conundrum. But overall, when land-use effects are taken into account,
The effect wipes out more than two-thirds of the carbon emissions that Europe s renewable-energy policy was supposed to save by 2020,
a hint that the official carbon footprint of Europe s transport fuel might eventually incorporate that science.
The root of the different immune responses lies with the mushroom-shaped haemagglutinin protein found on the outside of influenza-virus particles
and other molecules that account for as much as 35%of a plant s mass. The genetic-modification technique used, for instance, in the Roundup Ready crops made by the biotechnology giant Monsanto,
GM rice row Protesters uprooted a field of genetically modified (GM) golden rice at a Philippines Department of agriculture compound in Camarines Sur on 8 Â August,
Northern forests rev up carbon cyclenorthern forests are not just surviving but thriving, despite concerns about droughts, wildfires and bark beetles surging as the world warms.
Ecosystem productivity is rising at high latitudes, with a roughly 50%increase in the amount of carbon cycling through northern landscapes since the 1950s,
Boreal forests in particular have shown marked increases in carbon uptake during summer.""Something quite massive is taking place on large parts of the landscape that are impacted not directly by humans,
Instead, it seems to be driven primarily by a significant increase in carbon uptake by boreal forests to the south during the prime growing months of June and July.
which advises on carbon pricing and emissions cuts, and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, a green bank that was due to invest Aus$10 Â billion (US$9. 4 Â billion) over the next five years in renewable-energy projects.
this positively charged ion stays put in the soil, sticking to negatively charged clay particles. But then nitrifying soil bacteria go to work,
wreaking environmental havoc. They convert ammonium to nitrate (NO3 Ë), which washes into ponds and causes ecologically harmful algae blooms.
would enhance carbon storage and reduce the risk of the catastrophic fires that threaten lives and property,
and pour carbon into the atmosphere. That these reasons hold little water with the protesters highlights an emerging fissure among environmentalists and ecologists.
Congo carbon plan kicks offthe data will also enhance scientists understanding of tropical forests role in global climate regulation."
who has mapped already out carbon across the world s tropics, but at relatively low resolution of 1 kilometre.
His calculations suggest that the DRC s forests contain 22 billion to 24 Â billion tonnes of carbon,
to produce a measure of carbon for all 155 million hectares of jungle.""We have limited only areas where it s safe to land.
and in the past few years Peru has mapped the carbon in its part of the Amazon (see Nature 461,1048-1052;
) Brazil has made less-detailed assessments of forest carbon, but its system for monitoring deforestation is the world s most advanced.
and ultimately to verify reductions in such losses and sell carbon offsets. Matthew Hansen, a remote-sensing scientist at the University of Maryland in College Park who works with forest mappers in Kinshasa, says that the DRC project faces hurdles.
The paper, from a research group led by Gilles-Eric SÃ ralini, a molecular biologist at the University of Caen, France,
says Sun. One of these induces trees to release large amounts of the compound 3-carene a strong attractant to the beetles that is not released in response to the north American fungal variant.
The test cloud was created on 30 Â October by spraying particles collected from Iceland s Eyjafjallajã kull volcano into the air off the west coast of France (see Nature 502,422-423;
and will explore how atoms escape from the Martian atmosphere. MAVEN should reach its destination next September;
But potentially bioactive molecules described in research journals are still rising, according to a data-mining study of molecular structures in more than 140,000 journal articles and patents (C.  Southan et  al.
 In an earlier study, Sun and his team found that a chemical compound produced by beetle pupae,
Keith Adams, a plant molecular geneticist at the University of British columbia in Vancouver, Canada, thinks the idea that a genome duplication helped flowering plants to diversify is"an intriguing hypothesis
in that carbon locked in soils and plants on former agricultural land might be released into the atmosphere.
Schierhorn s study estimates, using vegetation modelling, that 470 million tonnes of carbon which would equate to about one-third of US CO2 emissions in 2012
and Ukraine (see Carbon goes wild). SOURCE: F. Schierhorn et al. Glob Biogeochem. Cycles http://doi. org/qg8 (2013) Wild vegetation is taking up carbon at a rate three times greater than previously estimated by some researchers,
and the sink could become even more substantial as forests form, the team reports. Abandoned land, says Schierhorn,
accounts for about one-third of the carbon sink provided by all forests in western Russia.
In a 2008 study, he and his team calculated a carbon sink of about 8 million tonnes per year in abandoned cropland in Ukraine
)" The strength of a carbon sink depends not only on current biological activity but also on former crop management practices such as fertilizer use, says Vuichard.
the environmental impact of producing meat in terms of everything from carbon emissions to water use is typically many times larger than that of producing vegetable foods.
Antihydrogen made Physicists have produced a stream of antihydrogen atoms for the first time. Members of the Atomic Spectroscopy And Collisions Using Slow Antiprotons experiment at CERN,
and trap the particles, they can characterize small differences between antihydrogen and hydrogen. These differences could help to explain why the Universe contains more matter than antimatter.
the more kilos of carbon it puts on each year.""The trees that are adding the most mass are the biggest ones,
and their gradual move towards a plateau in the amount of carbon they store as they reach maturity2.
whereas earlier studies had looked typically at the overall carbon stored in a plot. Estimating absolute growth for any tree remains problematic,
the rate of carbon accumulation depends on how fast old forests turn over.""It s the geometric reality of tree growth:
or providing old-growth habitat and increasing carbon stocks. More broadly the research could help scientists to develop better models of how forests function
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